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Three women are shown in earnest conversation before a curtained window through which a flower garden is visible. The arrangement of the bodies and the close grouping of the heads give the gathering a sense of drama and a conspiratorial air. It was this humorous and incisive quality that the author Virginia Woolf admired most about the painting when she praised it in a letter to her sister: ‘I think you are a most remarkable painter.

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But I maintain you are into the bargain, a satirist, a conveyer of impressions about human life: a short story writer of great wit and able to bring off a situation in a way that rouses my envy.’